Archive

I’m not the biggest fan of the Christmas season. Frankly, Thanksgiving is the holiday with the mostest.

Of the many social pressures, designing the family Christmas card (in Photoshop) and meeting expectations, doesn’t make the month any better. But this season, there were two cards to design (company and family), but I think they turned out pretty well. Can you guess which one’s the family card?Read more…

This is a Javascript version of a Grid Clock I had fun making for myself on a train trip home last week. I tried to waste as few characters as possible. The clock is built without using any libraries or external files (you can view the code by just selecting view source).

The clock is inspired by Qlocktwo, but this clock uses the letters in the grid far more efficiently, allowing it to overlap words that share letters (that won’t be displayed at the same time) and display additional information such as noon, midnight, am, pm, just, almost, and past. This clock uses almost for the last three minutes before the hour, and just past for the first three minutes past the hour. Click read more below for Processing/Arduino info.

After sharing a dozen made up stories with my kids last night, we came up with the idea of storytopia. With graphical help from the amazing Noun Project, we had a working version 20 minutes later… just in time for bed.

Create a story that includes aspects that include all of the squares on the screen (they are randomly chosen from 382 images).

You may reposition the squares onscreen with your mouse (if that helps).

Today I built a nice looking iPhone application (an analog clock) and managed to build it in a language that I had never seen before in just an hour or so. This feat was entirely because of how simple the folks at Ansca have made programming for the iPhone.Read more…

At long last, my new open source Firefox add on, AnalogClock, is available for download from the Mozilla site. The clock uses the canvas tag to display an analog clock (with hands) in your browser status bar.

More chore list this weekend included taking care of a bicycle in my garage that was locked up with a Kryptonite lock with no key (lost over several moves).

First thing I did was to text message a hard-core cycling friend, who suggested I YouTube search Bic Pen and Kryptonite. Turns out, opening an older cylinder-lock Kryptonite product is, with a bit of luck, actually pretty easy.

This lock picking technique revelation was made public a few years back, and Kryptonite quickly offered to fix the locks (a good percent of them could be opened) but only a small percent of owners took advantage of the offer.

Step one was to find a ball point pen, and reduce it down to a single hollow plastic cylinder.

The next step was to jam the plastic cylinder into the lock (not too hard) and rotate it around fruitlessly for about 9 minutes.

Step three was to give the plastic cylinder a medium-strength tap with a hammer.

With a few more twists back and forth, voila, the lock opened and the bicycle was saved.

My attempt to open my lock took about ten minutes, but I could probably do it again in just a few minutes by fast forwarding to the hammer step.

PS: If any bike thieves are reading this, I hate you. You and your kind have taken two of my favorite possessions from me at a time in my life when I couldn’t afford to replace them.